Some of the most evocative writing in English is in the 1611 King James Bible, which, by the 19th Century, became the single most printed book in the world. Much of the prose is beautiful, often majestic. But from it we also get bite the dust, wits' end, the haves and the have-nots, baptism of fire, streets paved with gold, blind leading the blind, casting pearls before swine, cast the first stone, bottomless pit, a stumbling block, a fly in the ointment and so on. The King James Bible was created to correct translation problems from the Greek and Hebrew in previous bibles. One of its most famous phrases is the quick and the dead, but it didn’t originate with the work.
© 2024 John Oliver
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